The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

  “Go ahead, go to bed. You’re right, we should,” Alice said. “I think I’ll sleep here tonight.” She allowed them to arrange the pillows beneath her head, tuck her in.

  Once they’d gone to their rooms, she turned to face the cold glass that looked out onto the courtyard, looked for the blank relief of sleep.

  Chapter 6

  Lainey abandoned the Dump Conner campaign when she started hooking up with, and then legitimately dating, Lesley, one of Conner’s teammates. Like Conner, he was a tall junior who looked like a man, but unlike Conner, who was white enough to pass for a stock-image photograph from a fifties country club, Lesley was black. And golden in the cheeks, burnt sienna where his hair and neck met, the rusty glow at the ends of his curls an auburn corona.

  “Yup, the rare black redhead,” he said, when he caught her staring. She knew better than to ask to touch.

  “Seems you know something about unusual hair color yourself.” He nodded at her, and the way he said unusual, stretched the vowels—she had to see his tongue again.

  “Oh, right,” she said, touching her own hair, violet for October. “Mine’s natural, too,” and then, voice lowered, she heard herself add, “And the carpet does indeed match the drapes.” The cliché had been stuck in her head since he’d called himself a redhead, and burst out in reaction to how hard she’d been trying to suppress it.

  He gave a big, full-throated laugh and she was filled with joy for having said something so stupid, as his laughter gave her a long look at his perfect pink tongue again.

  “No cavities,” she said, learning already that being near him made her incapable of keeping her mouth closed. She worried now that she’d say something offensive, that the effort to avoid doing so would rocket back around like a racist boomerang, knock her square in the face.

  “What’s that?” he asked, a smaller smile this time, and one raised eyebrow, the hair of which was black, but maybe a little reddish, though she couldn’t be sure without a closer look.

  “Nothing, no, I was just thinking of I guess not getting dessert.” She waved toward the soft serve machine.

  “You live with Margaret and them, right?” he asked, and put his tray down beside hers. “I play basketball with Conner. That’s my boy.”

  “Oh,” she said, irked at being “Margaret and them” before allowing that this was fair if he was Conner’s teammate.

  “All right if I eat with you? I’ve got to jet soon, though.” He was already sitting, and she stood there, staring at the top of his head.

  “Sure, yes, why don’t you,” she said, unsure how to speak or sit. “Alice is joining me in a bit, but—do you know Alice? She rows crew, she lives with us, too. And Ji Sun.”

  “Yeah, I’ve met Ji Sun,” he said. “What’s up with her outfits?”

  “How do you mean?” Lainey finally sat down, hands still on her tray.

  “She’s kinda . . . monklike or something. Not sure. Like she’s wearing the world’s nicest bathrobe?” He was so adorable. She wanted to crawl into his lap.

  “I think it’s just higher fashion than we’re used to seeing around here, to be honest.” Lainey was only realizing this herself, unfamiliar as she was with some of the brands in Ji Sun’s full, neat closet, outfitted with organizers that no one seemed to remember her installing.

  “I like what you’ve got on,” he said, and gave her a different smile, slyer.

  “Oh, so you are one of those.”

  “Excuse me. One of what?” he teased, but it felt loaded.

  “An athlete,” she said. “A flirt.” She was wearing her shortest cutoff jean shorts with dark purple tights underneath, a ratty V-neck Sleater-Kinney T-shirt, and an oversized cardigan. It was her favorite Friday outfit, and it pleased her that he noticed.

  Now he clicked his tongue in his cheek as a confirmation. She was exhilarated to be flirting like this, over a meal, with the lights on, rather than drunk at a dark party, hoping the person she kissed still appealed to her when she could better make out their face. By the end of the meal, they’d exchanged numbers and he’d touched her knee, lightly, just the softest skitch across the nylon there. Alice had had to stay late at the lab and Ji Sun decided at the last minute to eat at a restaurant. Lainey was glad for the luck of both of them skipping this dinner, but part of her wished they’d been there just to watch, to confirm for her that there was something visible in the air around her and Lesley, some kind of orb that lights up when there is potential for love between two people, not yet confirmed, but activated, radiant, irresistible.

  * * *

  • • •

  One month later, at the start of November, Lesley and Conner planned to come over with two of their teammates. Alice was away for a crew meet, but the boys had already planned to come as a foursome.

  “More for you to choose from!” Lainey said, as Ji Sun sat on her bed, rating Lainey’s outfit options. “Or you could hook up with both?” Lainey was already drinking, sipping wine from a beaker that Alice had brought home to use as a vase. Lainey waggled her eyebrows and flopped back on the bed, giggling.

  When the boys arrived, Lainey went to bring them up from the small lobby. They brought the smell of the cool fall night in with them, damp and smoky.

  They settled around the window seat, with Margaret going to sit in Conner’s lap, like usual. She did so even in the dining hall, and it drove Lainey nuts. Lainey set out a cafeteria tray of snacks and offered the boys some of the boxed wine that Conner kept them supplied with. “I can do you one better,” Conner said, and took out a flask, larger than the one that Alice had kept after brandishing it that night in the woods.

  The two teammates were cute enough, though neither pulled any cord in Ji Sun’s core. She appreciated the way their shoulders looked in their sweaters, but she tended to be attracted to moodier boys, with longer hair and more sullen expressions. Her sister said it was because she’d watched too many Boy George videos as a kid, ruining her for anyone but androgynous white boys. The cuter one, Ruben, wasn’t white, but Blasian, a word Ji Sun had learned earlier that night from Lainey. He had kind eyes and a mean smile. As the wine warmed her cheeks and belly, Ji Sun could imagine a good night rolling around with him.

  They drank and made fun of each other’s favorite bands from high school, and the taller teammate, Jeremy, whom the boys called Jerm, took a baggie of weed out of his pocket.

  “Wait, should we hold off?” Ruben asked. “Isn’t there a piss test Monday?”

  “Nah, only scholarship kids have to take it,” Jeremy said. He’d dropped to the floor to roll the joint, kneeled over the window seat as if hunched down in prayer. Before he’d finished, Margaret had gone to her room for a rolled-up towel that she placed beneath the door to the hall, draped a cream pashmina around her shoulders, opened two windows, and reached for the just-lit joint. Lainey stared at her, stunned by how she could move so quickly and still seem unhurried, elegant. So often it seemed as though others were waiting on Margaret—returning her library books, giving her lecture notes, heating up her ramen with their own—that when she whirled into efficiency like this, Lainey took notice. It seemed only to happen when boys were around.

  “That’s so fucked up!” Lainey said, taking the joint from Margaret. “Only students on scholarship have to take drug tests?”

  “It’s a condition of some scholarships, yeah,” Jeremy said, rolling his eyes at Lainey and taking back the joint.

  “Do they not just administer them to the entire team?” Ji Sun asked.

  Jeremy turned to pass the joint to Lesley.

  “Do you not . . . should you?” Lainey asked Lesley.

  “I’m not on scholarship. My parents are pretty rich.” Lesley took the joint and passed it to Ji Sun. “Ladies first.” He nodded.

  “Oh, I didn’t—I wasn’t trying to—” Lainey felt her cheeks burn.

  “Not lik
e a lot of these kids’ parents, mind, but they do all right.”

  He hadn’t tried to reassure her, and she felt a frantic rush to prove herself not-racist.

  “I just meant, like, a sports scholarship.”

  “Q-H doesn’t give those. Girl, retreat. You don’t know my SAT scores.” He winked, but he’d hurt her. She’d hurt him, rather, and it smarted to feel so foolish. She had taken such pains to differentiate herself from the entitled students that surrounded her, and here she was, one of them.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, feeling a blush so deep she thought it must be purple.

  “All right, then,” he said, and pulled her close. “Aren’t you gonna ask?”

  “Ask what?” Lainey wondered at what she didn’t know. Was there a code to undo this? A question to prove she wasn’t like those who assumed any black student who got in did so thanks to affirmative action?

  “My SAT scores! Bet I schooled your fine ass in math.”

  She loved to hear him call her ass fine, felt a wash of relief. At home, she was one of few nonwhite students in her class, and she’d realized already that she’d arrived at college thinking this made her exempt from accusations of racism. But here she was, assuming her own boyfriend was on scholarship because he was black. She was on partial scholarship herself! And Lesley had all the usual markers of wealth, which Lainey was expert at identifying: the new iBook; Ray-Ban sunglasses; a different pair of fresh sneakers for every day of the week; and, most of all, an ease with all these things, an assurance that there was more where they came from.

  She had made herself a student of Lesley, her cultural envoy into Southern California—SoCal, he called it—blackness, and basketball. She dropped hellas, used his cocoa butter on her elbows, borrowed and belted his Kobe Bryant jersey to wear over gold tights. She wondered what it would be like to move beyond the bubble of campus with him, what kinds of looks they might get. She wanted the chance now to grip his hand tighter, puff up her chest, stare down—even from half a foot lower than Lesley—anyone who looked at them askance.

  Lesley smiled at Lainey now, but Ji Sun had seen his lip curl. In their Intro to Human Psychology course they had just learned that it was disgust—not jealousy, not fury—that was the most common predictor of divorce. Ji Sun wondered if Lainey had seen it, if she should warn her. Ji Sun thought she should adopt Alice’s approach to boys. Alice was the only one of the four who had no interest in a boyfriend, who was against the very idea. She was too busy, she said, and what good would it do her? She could hook up with people whenever, and why would she want to spend time with them beyond that? Ji Sun understood this as she, too, was so enveloped in their friendship that the idea of devoting emotional energy to another person seemed exhausting. She would hook up with Ruben, she decided, and when Alice got back on Sunday afternoon she’d tell her all about it, together forge the no-boyfriend contingent.

  Everyone was drunk now, and stoned, and Conner and Margaret had already tangled themselves up in a mess of limbs on the window seat. Lainey held Lesley’s hand, led him to her room, hers alone for the weekend with Alice away. Ji Sun saw now that Ruben was asleep on the futon, a trail of drool pooled on the cushion beneath his mouth. She looked at Jeremy, who watched Margaret and Conner with a kind of open hunger that did arouse her a little bit. He was very tall, with stubble and acne on his cheeks. The best thing about him was his big nose, which reminded Ji Sun in some way she couldn’t explain of a cruise ship, impressive and absurd.

  “They’ll have to get a room or we will,” she said, and covered her mouth as a hiccup escaped. If she wanted to, they would. They were the last two; it was as simple as spin the bottle.

  Ji Sun loved kissing and Jeremy was competent. He tasted smoky and astringent, and not like beer at all, a welcome change from her most recent drunken hookups. He put his hands in her hair and began to kiss along her jaw and neck; she stood and offered her hand, and he followed her.

  In her room, he changed. He opened her shirt before she could, grabbed at her nipples, lowered his face so he could bite and suck, a hickey forming already on her breast. He seemed not to want to have sex with her, and she was relieved. She could kiss for hours but most of the boys she’d kissed in college had been in a rush to do the next thing, to do more. Most of them seemed to think that it wasn’t even worth kissing unless they might get a blow job out of it.

  She moved Jeremy back up to her face and sucked on his bottom lip, hard enough that she knew it would be plum colored in the morning.

  “The fuck . . . ,” he muttered, and pulled away. He gave her a smile that seemed sweet until he said, “I thought Asian girls were supposed to be all submissive and shit.” He laughed like he knew she would, too, but she pushed him off of her.

  “Okay, we’re done,” she said. He came back for her neck, like he hadn’t even heard her, and sucked in the way she had on his lip, to bruise.

  “Stop it,” she said. “I’m bored with you now.” Submissive. She wouldn’t waste her time trying to teach him anything, but she would make sure submissive wouldn’t be among the words he’d remember her by.

  “Fuck you, bitch.” He stood and seemed both drunker and stone sober in a split second. He looked the height of the room. “I was bored with you before we began.”

  How could he turn so quickly? He had been affable, eager, game to maybe kiss until morning, when neither would make any promises to call the other, but both would have felt it a night well spent.

  She thought of her friends, tangled up or passed out with their boyfriends. Should she call out for them? He didn’t mean enough to her to make her cry, but the way he’d spoken, the snarl in his lip—she felt if he didn’t leave soon she might cry anyway.

  “Get out of my room,” she said, and he stayed looming over her. She buttoned her shirt while he watched, unmoving. He seemed to grow taller.

  She went to the door and he stayed standing over her bed. His cheeks puffed up, and as she opened the door she realized he was gathering spit, hocking a loogie, Alice called it, when she had to spit after a run. He dredged up phlegm from his throat and spat, loud and wet, on her pillow. Looked at her while he did.

  “Get out,” she said, wanting to shout now, but still afraid that if she raised her voice she would cry, not so much because of what he did, but because she’d been fooled by him. He stayed there, lips wet, staring her down.

  “Get out!” By now Ji Sun was loud enough that she heard movement from the other rooms, and Margaret called out, “Sunny? Ji Sun, are you okay?”

  Margaret came to Ji Sun’s open door, wearing only her bra and a pair of boxer shorts.

  “Jesus H.,” Jeremy said. “Your body.” He was still on the other side of Ji Sun’s bed, mouth wider now.

  Lainey and Lesley joined the commotion, and Lainey took charge.

  “All of you need to leave.” Lainey turned to Lesley. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Get him out of here.” She pointed at Jeremy, who had finally exited Ji Sun’s room, but appeared to have done so only to get a better look at Margaret’s breasts.

  “What’s up?” Conner came out of Margaret and Alice’s room, rubbing his eyes.

  “Get dressed,” Lainey said. “Get Ruben and get out.” She tossed Conner the pile of fleece basketball zip-ups they’d left on the window seat and put her arm around Ji Sun. Margaret kicked their pile of huge shoes out into the hall and wrapped her arms around Conner, gave him a long kiss before closing the door.

  Once they were gone, Ji Sun did cry. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell her friends about Jeremy’s spit, only said that he’d turned racist, mean.

  “He became too . . . aggressive,” she said, though one semester into college, she already knew how “aggressive” had come to contain a huge swath of behaviors, from pressing too close against an ass on the way to a keg, to rape.

  Lainey asked if they should call their RA, or health servic
es.

  “No, no, he didn’t do anything . . . like that,” she said. “He didn’t assault me. He was just an asshole.”

  What might he have done if she hadn’t shouted, if Margaret, still in her shirtless coat of armor, hadn’t come to the door? Reduced to summary, what he had done didn’t seem like much: he insulted her, he spit—not even on her, but toward her, on her bed. He stared at her with his teeth bared, refused to move. He called her bitch in a way that felt worse than the times she’d been called bitch before. These were not things to report to anyone, not even her friends, and she was feeling foolish now, for causing everyone to derail the party and toss the boys out.

  “We have to look out for each other,” Lainey said. “Freshmen women are the highest-risk group for date rape.” Lainey was going to minor in Gender and Women’s Studies, and she’d already begun to volunteer at the campus women’s center.

  “He didn’t rape her, Lainey!” Margaret shivered, reached for a blanket.

  Everywhere they turned this was the menace, and the only way to protect against it was together.

  “I know, I’m just saying.” Lainey turned to Ji Sun again. “I’m sorry, Ji Sun.”

  “Me, too,” Margaret said. “Some of Conner’s friends are jerks, but I didn’t know Jeremy was so bad.”

  Which ones were okay? How could you tell?

  “It’s fine,” Ji Sun said. “I’m fine.” With the boys gone, and Alice arriving back the next morning, she felt there was a chance this could be true, even if it wasn’t yet.